Joker,
By 2020 the EU will have smart meters for electricity and gas. Italy already has started fitting them now.
The utility companies are very slow to adopt new technology - they do not want to spend money unless they have to - or are forced by EU Law!
In the meantime, there are a few low cost energy monitors such as Electrisave/Cent-a-Meter, CurrentCost, Wattson and a few new ones just coming to the market. Some of these have data output which can connect to a PC or serial logging device.
Someone has worked on the Electrisave wireless protocol so that it can be decoded by a PC or Arduino - using just a very low cost 433MHz receiver (taken from wireless doorbell).
For many people, just to see approximately how much energy they are using, and how much it costs, is enough to make them save. The accuracy of the energy monitors is not too good - perhaps +/- 10%, but that is close enough for the average home user.
For those without ethernet or broadband internet there are several ways in which a logger can get data to a server via a plain old telephone line. It is possible to implement the DTMF dial and simple modem functions into an ATmega168.
I hope that you will soon be in a position to share your project ideas more.
Bon Annee a Vous!
G